We've all dreamed about driving an F1 car on the public road, haven't we?
What it would feel like on your favourite B-road
or booting it onto the motorway,
but now there's something that directly transfers
the experience of an F1 car to the road
and it's just extraordinary.
We're not just talking about any Formula One car either.
This is Lewis Hamilton's Formula One car
that's been handing it to the competition in various iterations
for the last five years.
It's the car formerly known as the AMG Project One,
now just the AMG one,
and it's yours if you can find around 2.5 million pounds
down the back of your sofa. Oh!
And you gotta convince one of the 275 buyers
to give you their billed slot.
Prototypes of this thing are already running around.
But first customers won't get their cars until mid-2020,
Understandably, there's been a slight delay
getting a Formula One powertrain to behave in a road car,
but nobody has had access to this car quite like this in a studio.
This is our chance to pour over every detail of this mad project,
and where else to begin but with the engine.
Under there is the actual 1.6 litre V6 turbo
lifted directly from Lewis's 2015 F1 car,
driving the rear wheels.
It will spin to an ear-splitting 11,000 rpm,
down from the 14,000 RPM it hits in F1,
but then this thing has to idle at 1,200 rpm, not 4,000,
and be capable of doing the school run, not just setting lap times.
Think of it like retraining Usain Bolt to win the 10,000 metres.
AMG says throttle response is better than a naturally aspirated V8
because there's an electric motor to spin the turbo up instantly,
and when it's not doing that,
it harvests any extra energy created by the turbo
and feeds it back into the system.
Like F1, this car is all about recuperating
and reusing every drop of energy.
But the engine is just the beginning.
There's also three Formula One electric motors,
spinning up to 50,000 rpm each
and producing 160 horsepower apiece.
One of them operates on the crankshaft.
The other two are on the front axle,
spinning a wheel each for precise torque vectoring,
and then the lithium-ion battery pack sits behind the seat.
Total power output: at least 1,050 horsepower we're told,
but this thing can also run in a pure EV mode,
at which point it can do 15 miles in total silence
and front-wheel drive.
Needless to say, it will be stupidly fast.
217 miles per hour flat-out,
Naught to 62 in around 2.7 seconds
and naught to 124 miles an hour in under six,
and it's that second number that has our attention.
That's 1.2 seconds faster than a Porsche 918 Spyder
and half a second quicker than the Bugatti Chiron.
But lap times is where this thing should annihilate the competition.
There will be a Nurburgring time at some point.
It's a brave man that takes that one on,
but interestingly the boss of MG, who I just had a coffee with,
says around a shorter track, this versus a full-blown F1 car
would be a lot closer than we think.
Clearly, that's a race we demand to see.
The One hasn't so much been styled as shaped by the wind.
Where it's not serving an aero purpose, the body is smooth and slippery.
The 10 spoke wheels available in aluminium or magnesium have carbon inserts
to minimise drag.
Even the badge will be airbrushed on to save weight and reduce resistance.
The aero is active too, so down here, you've got these huge intakes
on the front end with movable flaps,
depending on whether you want minimum drag or maximum cooling.
Up here, we've got these vents, these flaps in the front wheel arch,
which stand to attention in maximum-attack mode.
Just like that and increase downforce over the front axle.
Moving along, we have the engine intake sitting up here on the roof,
but it's no longer flush with the bodywork.
There's actually a channel that runs underneath it.
That means you get the cleanest, least turbulent air running into there
and into your F1 engine back here.
Either side of it, two NACA ducts that funnel air
into the oil coolers,
and then we get to the fin, the central spine,
not only a defining characteristic of this car,
but it also improves stability at high speeds and in the corners
and cleaves the airm so when it arrives at this wing,
it's nice and clean and the wing can work efficiently.
And what about this wing? Full width, electrically deployable.
It has a wing within a wing. How cool is that?
Here in its maximum downforce mode,
and down there, the mother of all diffusers.
Now there is no figure for downforce on this car yet,
only that it will produce more downforce than a GT3 race car.
Any more than that and the pressure on the tyres would be just too intense.
The first thing you notice when you climb in
is the driving position is nowhere near as extreme as the Aston Martin Valkyrie.
Yep, I've sat in that one, too, with my feet somewhere up around my ears.
Here, your feet are in line with your hip point,
which feels entirely natural.
The seats are fixed to the carbon tub,
so you move the wheel and pedals instead, just like the Ford GT.
I have to say it does feel suitably special in here
and quite comfortable as well.
So what have we got? We've got two 10-inch screens in front of us,
some vents here for the aircon and an F1-shaped steering wheel
with pretty much all the controls you need right in front of you.
One of those is a dial down here
that selects your driving mode, and that's what we're going to focus on,
because you will have a pure EV mode, then you will have a range extender mode.
That's when the engine is just switched on to charge the batteries.
After that, a duo all-general hybrid mode, and after that a maximum-attack mode
which you can set to maintain the battery charge you already have
or deplete everything for that one ballsy hot lap.
The stability control, it does have an interim sport setting,
if you like, but it can be entirely switched off.
Even so, I'm told this thing isn't set up for big smokey drifts.
I think I know a couple of people who might disagree with that.
Up here, you have your rear view mirror,
which is fed from a camera at the base of the rear fin.
Down here, you have somewhere to put your smartphone,
and that's about it to be honest, but come on,
when you've got a thousand horsepower, what more could you possibly need?
I just can't sign off without talking about the Aston Martin Valkyrie.
For every great champion to produce their best, they need an archrival,
and the Valkyrie is just that.
Both these cars are born from F1. This a slightly more literal translation.
The Valkyrie a freak from the mind of an F1 great,
but however they've got there, what we've ended up with
is two cars with over a thousand horsepower.
They're aero-obsessed, weight- obsessed,
and both are designed to eviscerate racetracks.
So, just like the P1, the 918 and the LaFerrari defined their eras,
well this incredible machine and the Valkyrie
are about to do the same again,
albeit by taking us to an even more extreme place.
Tell you what, it's quite a time to be alive.